


The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb

by La Reine Noire (lareinenoire)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms
Genre: Conspiracies, Gen, Legal Shenanigans, Murder, References to Sexual Assault, Targaryen Hijinks, noir-ish, references to domestic abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-15 09:13:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29186844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lareinenoire/pseuds/La%20Reine%20Noire
Summary: Everyone has hobbies. Shiera Seastar’s happen to be a bit unusual.
Relationships: Brynden "Bloodraven" Rivers/Shiera Seastar
Comments: 1
Kudos: 18





	The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mindset](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mindset/gifts).



> For Mindset, who included Brynden/Shiera in the list of OTPs but kindly gave me free rein to do pretty much whatever I wanted with them. Many thanks to crossingwinter for the last-minute beta! Title from Friar Laurence’s speech opening _Romeo and Juliet_ , Act 2, Sc. 3.

You could say I killed my first man at the age of nine.

At the very least, I was accessory to the murder.

He was a baker who kept a shop near the Hill of Rhaenys in King’s Landing. His friends all spoke highly of him—he didn’t cut his flour with sawdust, or shortchange his customers; he spent his evenings in the tavern as other men did; he paid his taxes, and attended services at the local sept on all the appointed days. His bread was neither the best nor the worst in the city, but reassuringly average. As for his wife, she rarely left the house, and the men who did notice the bruises on her face assumed she was clumsy. Perhaps they did guess the truth, and simply did not care.

Her neighbor was a seamstress, and she was the one who told my handmaid about the baker when she came to her door to buy tansy tea. _Every time he goes drinking, he comes home and beats her. Like as not he rapes her too. She won’t bring a child into his house. She would rather die_. My handmaid Ysetta was an older, Rhoynish woman who had once served my mother, and while many called her sharp or stern, she never turned away a person in need.

“She cannot come for this on her own?” Ysetta asked quietly. “I would prefer to speak with her myself. There are risks with tansy tea, things she should know.”

The seamstress shook her head. “She almost never leaves the house alone. He won’t let her. I only see her on washing days.”

Ysetta frowned. “I need to brew more of the tea. What I have is not enough if she is already pregnant, but it may help her if she isn’t. Come back in a week’s time and I will have more for you.”

After the seamstress left, I tugged at Ysetta’s skirt and whispered to her that what the woman needed wasn’t tansy tea. It was to be rid of the husband who beat her.

Over the next week, Ysetta made her own enquiries near the baker’s shop. I did not go with her, but I remember that her face had a strange expression when I asked her about it. When the seamstress returned, I saw it on her face once more.

“This baker’s wife, your friend,” Ysetta asked the seamstress, “can she take care of the business on her own? Will she be out on the streets without her husband?”

The young woman’s eyes were wide. Even I knew she understood. “All the customers see him, but everything they sell, she made with her hands. They would drink toasts to him and forget him, so long as the bread arrives on time.” She raised her chin. “We will help her.”

After a few moments, Ysetta went to the locked case where she kept her poisons. She pressed a small vial into the seamstress’ hands. “Four drops in his morning ale for the next three days. On the fourth, give him the rest,” she said. “No earlier than that, or it will look suspicious.”

After the woman left, Ysetta closed the door and locked it. “You cannot speak of what you have seen,” she told me.

“It was my idea,” I told her. “I won’t say a word.”

“Not even to Brynden.” Protest rose in my mouth, but the look on her face silenced me before I spoke. “I mean it, Shiera. This must be _our_ secret. Taken to your grave.”

I nodded, my throat dry. I had never tried to keep a secret from Brynden before. “He deserves it, though.”

“Many of them deserve it. But we must pick our battles carefully. And, most importantly, we must not get caught.”

***

Ysetta had a Rhoynish name for the poison, but the women who came to her called it _Widow-maker_. She distilled it herself using a careful selection of plants from her garden and one or two ingredients she traded for from the Free Cities, but while I was sometimes called upon to assist with certain steps, she did not teach me to make it until I was nearing my sixteenth name day. It was a long, careful process that took nearly two weeks and required, among other things, plants gathered beneath a full moon.

“Once you become known for it, it will shadow you for the rest of your days,” Ysetta told me as she crushed nightshade berries with a mortar and pestle. A week’s worth of berries would yield perhaps a bottle or two of essence. Some would go to the _Widow-maker_ , but half again as much would become part of Ysetta’s regular stores. At first, she made it only rarely, but when she decided to teach me, it was on the second batch of the year, and we had picked the garden clean. “But that is the healer’s work. You bring life into the world, and sometimes you take it away.”

“How do you know?”

“Know what?”

“That you’re taking the right life.”

Ysetta paused, frowning. “I’m not always right. And when I’m wrong, I ask forgiveness of the gods. Mother Rhoyne, she understands. I can only trust my heart and my mind, and what I know of people.” A brief smile lit her face, and her hands returned to their practiced motions. “You have a gift, seastar. If I did not think you worthy, I would let this knowledge die with me.”

She died a month after we completed the distillation, and left her house and garden to me.

The first thing I did, after locking the door behind me, was count the bottles of _Widow-maker_ in the lockbox. _Thirty-eight_.

I wondered how long they would last.

***

For the first week, easily half the women ran away when I opened the door. Secrets had been Ysetta’s stock-in-trade as much as potions and perfumes, and while I had assisted her when my lessons allowed, she saw plenty of women without me, and they would need to be convinced back. Or given time to rethink their choices on their own. Within a month, many had returned, and I had not yet opened the lockbox.

It took nearly six months for my first widow-to-be to arrive. By then, Daemon Blackfyre’s armies were laying waste to the Westerlands, and the man the poison was intended for was, among his many other sins, a supporter of the black dragon. I saw his widow strolling down the Street of Sisters with one of the gold cloaks soon afterward, looking not at all bereaved, and told myself that one fewer Blackfyre supporter in the world was still worth the price.

A few weeks later, another woman came. Then another. By the end of the year, I had exhausted Ysetta’s supply, and my half-brothers were marching on opposite sides to certain battle and death. I spent the two weeks through the full moon brewing a new batch of _Widow-maker_ so I didn’t need to think about Brynden falling beneath a Valyrian steel blade.

After ten days, Queen Myriah sent one of her maids after me with the news that the king’s army had won the day, and that Brynden was badly wounded. For any details, I would need to see her face to face. When I returned from the Red Keep the next day, all I could see was a dagger plunging into Brynden’s eye, and I returned to my potion, wishing as I crushed petals and berries and leaves that I was crushing Aegor Rivers’ skull.

In a stroke of irony, that first batch of _Widow-maker_ went into the lockbox and there remained for most of the next year, as I shuttered my house and garden to accompany Brynden to Summerhall for his recovery. It wasn’t until we had been there several weeks that he posed the question I had been dreading.

“I had a spy some months ago in King’s Landing. He was a stablehand who Fireball had trusted with his horses for years. Only he suddenly turned up dead one day. He’d complained of his belly, but that was all.” Brynden’s remaining eye was on her, but she determinedly continued writing her letter to Queen Myriah, careful to breathe deeply. “The gold cloaks couldn’t be bothered, but I sent one of my servants to investigate, and he found this in his widow’s trunk.”

Brynden placed a small bottle next to my hand, and my heart sank. My handwriting on the label would not have caught anybody else’s attention, but there was no chance of Brynden mistaking it. “I told her to throw the bottle in the river,” I said. “Clearly I should be more careful.”

“Perhaps use a scribe to label your bottles next time. Otherwise, you covered your tracks well enough.” There was nothing in his voice for me to seize on at first, but he laid one hand on my shoulder and added, “I do understand, you know. Why you didn’t tell me.”

I exhaled between my teeth. “Not everyone has access to the king’s justice, Brynden. I do what I must to help those who cannot help themselves.”

“You don’t need to tell me any more.” He nodded. “I trust you to keep yourself safe.”

It was never more than once every few years, but there were a number of suspected Blackfyre conspirators who found themselves on the wrong end of a bottle of _Widow-maker_ , and I could always be confident that nobody would ever come looking for them.

Ysetta had only ever wanted to protect me, and I didn’t blame her for not wishing me to trust my life to a man. But for all her wisdom, she had never known Brynden, not truly.

I confess I breathed easier knowing he knew.

***

There were rumours aplenty in the years that followed, that I was a witch, a sorceress, an ancient crone who used glamours to remain young and beautiful forever. But anyone who accused me of peddling poisons seemed to disappear, or at least keep quiet thereafter. I didn’t think too hard about that; only strived to know the women to whom I sold freedom from whichever man they claimed was tormenting them.

Still, I was careless sometimes. When I slipped, I followed Ysetta’s advice and made my own peace—if not with the gods, with her memory. I kept no records of the women I aided, for my safety and theirs.

Guilty as I am of murder, I say the gods will judge me truly. I leave this confession with no regrets.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is, indirectly, a companion piece to [Erring Star](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22368739).
> 
> The inspiration for this fic is [the 17th-century case of Giulia Tofana](https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-most-notorious-woman-killer-in-history-1cf0b0d8d78f), a Roman woman who was convicted of having poisoned around 600 men, many of them abusive husbands. We know so little about what Shiera and Brynden were up to between 196 and 233 AC that it didn’t seem implausible for Shiera to have had a long and illustrious career as, well, a serial killer.
> 
> The poison known as Tears of Lys appears in canon multiple times, as early as 54 AC when Androw Farman used it to murder the ladies serving his wife, Rhaena Targaryen. I’m supposing for purposes of this fic that Ysetta figured out, and taught Shiera, how to produce a close enough approximation, and that their Widow-maker draught is fundamentally the same thing under a different name, and without the cache that limits it to the wealthiest buyers.


End file.
